Any film with Toni Collette and Katrin Cartlidge has
to be amazing. I remember this one as being weird and loveable. I think it
might be the film where I made the acquaintance with these two favourites. Now
I see that other coming stars are in it – and odd and young Daniel Craig, an
unchanging Toby Jones, and many others I’ve seen in so many other films.

It’s as absurd as I remember it. The Hotel Splendide
is an enormous monster of a mansion on an isolated island off the coast of
Somewhere British. Guests who arrive never leave. Each one is more bizarre than
the last. The family who runs the place
is as dysfunctional as they come.

It’s a mix of Brazil,
Fawlty Towers and Charlie Chaplin.
It’s a hate/love story, a battle of the chefs, a conflict between cold showers,
abstention and enemas, and epicurean lust for life.

Bizarre, absurd, weird – these words hardly begin to
describe it. Add heart-warming and heart-breaking, daft, sweet, bittersweet,
poignant, eccentric, haunting – in more ways than one – and you might get the
idea.